A 6-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia whose arrest sparked a public outcry after he, his mother and sister were seized by ICE agents and sent to a Texas detention center is back in Los Angeles, one of the family’s lawyers said Friday.
The family, which had been held for a month in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, was released on Wednesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a lawsuit was filed on their behalf in San Antonio federal court.
“We were in the process of putting together a reply brief explaining why the government was wrong to hold them when we learned they were being released,” Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, told NBC News. “ICE released the family without a court order.”
The family was dispatched from the detention center to a shelter in south Texas, Mukherjee said.
“From there, they were put on a plane today and flown to LAX, where they were reunited with their family in Los Angeles,” Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee said “public pressure” over the plight of this family and the media coverage “helped free this family.”
Their release “demonstrates the power we have when we fight back against harmful, un-American policies,” attorney Kate Gibson Kumar of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which also represented the family, said on the group’s Facebook page.
“The practice of courthouse arrests is a blatant disregard for those lawfully seeking safety through the government’s own processes, and an even bigger disregard for our Constitution and the protections it provides, including Due Process,” wrote Gibson Kumar.
NBC News has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment and an explanation of whether the agency will continue trying to deport that family back to Honduras.
Gibson Kumar’s organization and the Columbia University Immigrants’ Rights Clinic sued ICE seeking to win the family’s release after they were seized following their May 29 asylum hearing in Los Angeles. The mother had been instructed to bring her children, who are out of school, to the hearing, Gibson Kumar said last week.
“They arrested the family in the hallway as they were leaving,” Gibson Kumar said. “The children were really scared. They were crying.”
While in detention, the 6-year-old, identified as N.M.Z. in a habeas corpus complaint, also missed a June 5 medical appointment, according to a court filing.
DHS had insisted repeatedly that the boy was examined several times while he and his family were locked up. In a post on X, DHS called allegations of medical neglect “fake news.”
“ICE always prioritizes the health, safety and well-being of all detainees in its care,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said last week.
The little boy was still living in Honduras when he was diagnosed at age 3 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a kind of blood cancer that can progress rapidly but is considered curable in most children.
Mukherjee told NBC News earlier that when she visited the family in the facility, the 6-year-old exhibited some conditions that are known symptoms of his cancer.
“He has easy bruising,” Mukherjee said. “His right leg had a lot of black-and-blue marks on it, his left leg had black and blue marks on it, he had black-and-blue marks on his arms. He has bone pain occasionally. He has lost his appetite. These are all pretty concerning things.”
The family entered the U.S. legally on Oct. 26 when they applied for asylum with the now-defunct CBP One app and were given parole status.
The family declared it had fled Honduras after being subjected to “imminent and menacing death threats,” according to the habeas corpus petition.
The U.S. government determined they were not a flight risk and not a danger to the community and the mother was not put on an electronic monitor.
DHS gave the family a notice to appear at the May 29 court hearing to pursue their claims for humanitarian relief, Mukherjee said.
Meanwhile, according to their attorneys, the family set down roots in Los Angeles and the children enrolled in public school and were learning English. They also attended church every Sunday.
But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration directed judges to dismiss the cases of immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years, so ICE could more quickly deport them.
After the judge abruptly dismissed the family’s asylum request, the ICE agents were waiting for them in the hallway when the mother and her children left the courtroom.
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